essential-guide-to-qualitative-in-organizational-research

218 –––––––––– QUALITATIVE METHODS IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES ––––––––––––––––––TranscriptionTranscribing any spoken ‘text’ is a time-consuming activity and this was multiplied many timessince I was dealing with multi-party talk as opposed to two-person interviews. Equally, interms of CA, the level of detail transcribed is demanding. 3 It is the intricacies of interactionand not just the ‘content’ of what is said that must be transcribed. In addition, as bothFairclough (1992) and Psathas (1995) observe, it is the objectives of the research which guidesthe employment of particular symbols or system of notations. Fairclough adds that dependingupon the system of transcription it may ‘take anything from six to twenty-hours or more totranscribe one hour of recorded speech’ (1992: 229). Furthermore, recording clarity and thepassion with which the elites spoke all impacted upon the hours invested to transcribe the talk.A foot and headset transcriber assisted the transformation of the talk into the written formatas the tapes could be slowed down so that inaudible speech could be discerned. Yet, even thenthere were occasions where there were difficulties in discerning the utterance (Psathas, 1995;Psathas and Anderson, 1990). Analysts working with talk also acknowledge that the ‘status ofthe transcript remains that of “merely” being a representation of the actual interaction’ andthat ‘it is not the interaction and it is not the “data”’ (Psathas and Anderson, 1990: 77;Zimmerman, 1988).The transcripts generated from this particular company recorded false starts, hesitations andinterruptions. However, and this is an important point which does not conform to CA, pauseswere not recorded as tenths of seconds but were divided into two types: first, a short pause(less than a second) was marked by ‘(.)’ in the transcript; and secondly, a longer pause (morethan a second) was represented as ‘[brief pause]’. This level of transcription detail varies fromboth CA studies where pauses are timed in a split-second fashion (Jefferson, 1989; Psathas andAnderson, 1990) and from those studies which include organizational talk (for example,Forester, 1992; Knights and Willmott, 1992; Mangham, 1986) but where pauses are not notedand/or timed at all. Whilst there are various transcription systems in use which encompassfeatures such as laughter, coughs, tempo, intonation and so on, Psathas and Anderson (1990)offer a short but informed introduction to transcription generally. The key features to facilitatethe reading of the transcripts here can be found in the Appendix (p.224).In terms of the manufacturing company study, then, over a two-year period I repeatedlylistened to the tape recordings (termed ‘methodical listenings’ – Psathas and Anderson, 1990),generated transcripts and sought to understand how social order is produced, decisions aremade, meetings realized, role-identities assembled and ‘organization’ (re)created (one visualrepresentation of this process is found in Samra-Fredericks, 1998: 170). Given the interestin how elites ‘do’ strategy when face-meets-face, talk recorded during the monthly day-longexecutive meetings, for example, was one type of bounded event selected for detailed analysis. 4And one part of this overall analytical effort employed CA with details of other analytical routesoutlined elsewhere (Samra-Fredericks, 1994, 1996, 2000, 2003). Inevitably only a minuteproportion of the empirical materials (three brief extracts) are reproduced here and thediscussion is further confined to illustrating the ‘hallmark’ of CA, namely, the taking of turns.Illustrating conversation analysisThe analysis of elites’ talk could not avoid turn-taking since it is the ‘most fundamental unitof social action’ which ‘provide[s] a simple, economic and extraordinarily efficient way of